“The only way to prove you are a good sport is to lose.”

-Ernie Banks

One of the blessings of sport is the lessons it teaches. And one of the challenges of being a dad is finding those lessons when they are not readily apparent. Like when your team is down 21 points midway through the first quarter while your son’s tears freeze to his cheeks and snot freezes to the scarf that’s supposed to be keeping him warm but that he’s using as a handkerchief, while psychotic OSU fans stare him down and shout obscenities at his father.

While you curse the $609 you spent on a hotel room for one night, you also consider the countless texts clogging your iPhone from friends who are either talking trash or pretending to feel bad for you. You contemplate leaving the stadium early, expecting your son will witness a fight, and you want to say to your son, “These fans are not so bad,” but you can’t because the evidence shows otherwise. You want to say, “We can still come back,” but you know you won’t, and one of the lessons you’ve already taught your son is to tell the truth. And you’re feeling guilty for letting him wear his fall coat, forgetting his wool socks, and consuming a Slurpee, three hot dogs, a pretzel, popcorn, and a hot chocolate.

Yes, it’s hard to find lessons, especially after you spent a few weeks basking in the glow of your trip with your other son to a Lions game that took place in the cozy confines of Ford Field, where you paid less for tickets and had better seats, ate better food, and won in dramatic fashion. It was easier for you to pontificate about the wonders of fatherhood, to congratulate yourself on being such a good dad.

Now, in the frigid confines of Ohio Stadium, which from the outside looks like a place a gladiator might go to be swallowed by a tiger, it’s hard to find a lesson. “Daaaaad, I can’t g-g-g-o to s-s-s-chool,” Sam says, through shivers and sobs. “I can’t face Ari (his good friend who is an OSU fan)…this is the worst day ever…why did we come here? I hate Columbus.”

The nice couple next to us makes an attempt at consolation: “Your son has a lot of passion. I love that.” Then, to him: “I really respect you for coming all this way to support your team, buddy.” Earlier, when the Ohio State band came out and Sam yelled, “You call this music?!” the wife tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Son, you can root for whomever you want, but that right there is the best band in the world.” Then at halftime, her husband (otherwise a mild-mannered preppy type) with a maniacal look in his eye, yells, in the midst of some odd ritual with the trombone player, “Dot that motherf—ing I!”

Every completion, every sack, every taunt from the crowd drives Sam deeper into despair. So quickly, his 9-year-old brain had shifted from “We are probably going to win the national championship” to “Our season is ending, and there is nothing I can do about it.” He’s a child who really feels, and usually, I can count on him to let the feelings pass through him, but it isn’t happening. The grief is setting in, and he’s going to grieve right up until he falls asleep in that six hundred and nine dollar hotel room. A few rows back, two shirtless troglodytes slam Twisted Teas and yell to the sea of orange in our section: “You guys really travel well. Too bad you suck!”

“Dad, can we go now?” he blubbers between sobs at the end of the first quarter. My challenge is twofold: on the one hand, I want to teach a lesson that you don’t quit on your team. On the other hand, if we leave now, I will have paid roughly $20 for each minute of action. Then again, he just told me he can’t feel his toes, and he’s a few days into an ear infection. What will Andrea think? Is the lesson worth it if we have to amputate?

I decide it is. Tennessee makes the game close at halftime, and with us getting the ball to start the second, there is a glimmer of hope. And by glimmer, I mean I’m still pretty sure we aren’t coming back.

We don’t. OSU twists the knife with another long TD, and its fanbase erupts with a deafening refrain of “O-H-I-O!” chants that still haunt me. Sam hangs on until the fourth quarter, although he notices as the other Vols fans file out that they are being taunted. He’s run out of sobs and is now just despondent: “We may as well get it over with and hear them yell at us when we leave.”

We eject and seeing my opportunity to teach a lesson, I congratulate some of the human OSU fans we walk past. Then I say to Sam as loudly as I can: “Well, it’s good to know only some of the OSU fans are a**holes.” We manage to skirt around a fight between a Vols fan and a Buckeye fan, then hurry past the military tanks and are almost to the hotel lobby, which is teeming with gloating OSU fans, before we hear the sirens—the police on the way to the fights, is my guess. Sam, normally willing to watch a regular season USFL game on TV, refuses to watch the fourth quarter in the hotel room. He falls asleep with tears and snot thawing on his face under his new Tennessee blanket.

I lie awake, buzzing from the 7:30 pm coffee, still searching for life lessons. We have three hours in the car tomorrow, and I want to make sure it wasn’t for naught.

The ride home is a somber one, but I do a recap as we scarf down our Starbucks sandwiches. If we look at the entire trip, there were only about two hours that were truly awful. On the drive down, he watched College Gameday on my phone, which is special because I rail against watching just about anything on my phone. When we stopped for gas in Perrysburg, Sam had, in his words, “the greatest Slurpee of all time.” Then before the game, we got to explore a new city and campus, throw the football, and hang out with one of my best friends from college, who also picked up a random Tennessee fan at a Speedway in Indiana, who gave Sam a 3D-printed Tennessee necklace. The highlight was when Sam and I were tossing the football on the very site where Gameday had been staged, and a DJ started commentating on Sam’s catches with the crowd cheering him on. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Sam so happy.

And finally, while 20% of the OSU fans were awful, 80% were just fine. One guy, maybe in his thirties, slurred to Sam at the condiment stand: “Hey kid, your dad is awesome for taking you to this game. My dad was an a**hole; he never did anything like this for me.” His friend followed: “Yeah, and sorry about our fans, guys. We’re a bunch of assholes.” “A**hole” seems to be rather common in the OSU fan vernacular.

So that was the lesson: the 80/20 rule. Yes, 20% of the trip was absolutely awful, specifically the actual game. But that didn’t make for an awful trip. And 20% of the OSU fanbase was awful. But we can’t let them ruin our view of the other good people of Ohio. 20% of employees cause 80% of the problems. 20% of patients take up 80% of a nurse’s energy. 20% of a sales team make 80% of the sales. I haven’t researched it, but I’m sure it’s applicable to most aspects of life.

And I may have learned an even bigger lesson than Sam did: In the toughest moments, I’ve got to be the thermostat, not the thermometer. As hard as it was in that biting, Jack-from-The Shining cold, with Tennessee being embarrassed and Sam in hysterics, I had to remember that he was looking to me for cues, even if he didn’t know it.

Without that in mind, I may have fought one of those a**holes.

Question:

When did you have to “be the thermostat” when your kid was having an especially hard time?

Special thanks to Mitchell for enduring the pain with us, the Speedway guy for the necklace, Stevens for growing up in Perrysburg, and Aaron for not gloating (at least to me).